On 25 Sep 2014, at 04:05, meekerdb wrote:
On 9/24/2014 6:53 PM, John Clark wrote:
On Wed, Sep 24, 2014 at 5:52 PM, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]
> wrote:
>>> John argues that consciousness has real world consequences in
terms of being evolutionary selected
>> Either that or consciousness is the side effect of something
else that has real world consequences; if Darwin was right it can't
be any other way.
> You keep saying this. You also like to say things like
"consciousness is how information feels when it's being processed".
I like that idea. It shows that you can indeed consider
alternatives to the binary choice above. In this case evolution
created a very complex scenario for conscious to feel when being
processed. But it did not create consciousness,
Evolution is only interested in intelligent behavior because only
that and not consciousness helps get genes into the next
generation. So how did consciousness manage to produce at least one
being (me) that's conscious? There are only 2 possibilities:
1) Perhaps consciousness aids in producing intelligent behavior. If
this is true then it would be easier to make a intelligent computer
that was conscious than to make a Intelligent computer that was not
conscious. It would also mean that the Turing Test is not only a
test for intelligence but was also a good (although not infallible)
test for consciousness too.
2) The only way to produce intelligent behavior is to process
information, and perhaps it's just a brute fact that consciousness
is how information feels when it's being processed.
In my opinion #2 is more likely than #1 but if Darwin was right
then one of the two must be true, But either way consciousness must
be a biological spandrel, and if you ever run across a smart
computer you can conclude that it's probably conscious too.
I think #1 is more likely, so long as we identify consciousness with
what we experience, e.g. imaging, inner narrative, language (does
anybody here think they could formulate and understand Lob's theorem
without language?). #2 is is probably true in the sense that some
kind of consciousness goes with intelligent information processing.
But I think there are probably a wide range of different ways to do
intelligent information processing and they may give rise to
different kinds of consciousness (e.g. the hive mind of the Borg)
that would be hard for us to recognize in interacting with them.
Of course these are probably all equivalent under Bruno's idea that
consciousness is just being a universal computer and so babies and
trees and genome's are conscious too. But I think that's so broad a
concept of consciousness as to be obfuscatory.
You can take it like the idea that zero is a number. Number took his
meaning from numerus, meaning a lot. The first numbers were 3, 4, 5,
6, ... It took time for two and one to get the status. And much more
so for zero.
The consciousness of the universal machine might be trivial, and that
is why I concentrate to the Löbian machines which knows much more,
especially on themselves. They know that they are universal and they
know the price.
Bruno
Brent
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